Above, a crowd of about a dozen gathers outside the Coastal Bend College administration building to protest the firing of professors during Thursday night’s meeting. Tiele Dockens told the board during their public forum, “My graduation date now hangs in the balance of the choice you make today... There just has to be another way to cut a budget than to cut our faculty who generate revenue by offering classes to students.” See the video online at www.mySouTex.com for updates to this story.

BEEVILLE – Despite impassioned pleas to reconsider from three students and a division chair — and before a capacity crowd of nearly 70 — Coastal Bend College trustees Thursday night did not renew what may be nearly 10 percent of its faculty and staff.

Grappling with a continuing plunge in revenue, Board Chairman Paul Jaure had repeatedly warned that CBC was a business and that staff cutbacks might be necessary.

Upon returning to their seats after meeting in executive session for more than two hours, board members could be best described as resembling a jury about to render a guilty verdict in a capital murder trial.

Most of the members of the audience, who overtaxed the board room’s air conditioning and found copies of the agenda could be used as makeshift fans, returned when the board resumed its open meeting.

But if they expected the board to announce the names of those whose contracts were not being renewed, they were disappointed. Jaure adjourned the meeting without comment and board members hastily left the administration building under the careful eyes of a Beeville policeman brought in by the board for crowd control.

Jeanene Jones, a business division chair who was among those not named, tried to comfort two of her students who were in tears over the prospect of losing their favorite instructor.

In the beginning, there was the spoken word. The first words concerned the doings of gods and kings, and these stories were passed on through generations. In the 5th century B.C. all the narratives were written down an literature began. At the same time, there was great controversy and a crisis developed. Should the written word be available to all or only to those in power: usually the king or the church. We all know that the church and the king won that argument and became the custodians of culture and information for more than two thousand years. The commoner stayed illiterate until the machine age when workers needed to read instructions so they could handle machinery. Many thought this a dangerous experiment. If the common people knew too much, might they not overthrow their masters? This time the workers won the right to literacy and in due time overthrew their masters.

Now we have a crisis facing us again. Many believe that any form of narration and learning can be transmitted through audiovisual means (PC's, tablets) rather than through the written word. Teachers are being dismissed under the guise of "cutbacks due to low tax revenue," even though revenue in many areas has been rising thanks to oil exploration, sales taxes, lotteries, etc. Literacy rates are plummeting while busy little thumbs text out gibberish or respond to editorials with LOL's, 4U's, I8U, and more.